5 reasons Red Sift Cloud is better than AWS Lambda

OK, before you all start sharpening your metaphorical stakes to skewer me for the click batey comparison, I’d like to apologise. However, I’ve learned over the years that trying to get the concept of a new product, service or platform over is best achieved by comparing it to one that people are familiar with. So, all kudos to Lambda, and now I’ll start the comparison.

1. Apps not just functions

Each Lambda is a world unto itself, and executes a single function. Creating an overall application with Lambda involves externally wiring together of Lambda’s. Of course, there are project like Serverless, which will at least bind together a group of Lambda’s into a service, but these are over and above the Lambda offering and don’t offer any real glue functionality. Red Sift apps can be as simple as single Lambda functions, but can expand to multiple functions, operating asynchronously and communicating with each other in a Directed Acyclic Graph, all defined by a single JSON file.

2. Baked in Statefulness

Lambda’s are inherently stateless, and execute exactly the same way every time given the same inputs. So far, so functional. However, in the real world applications generally have a need to maintain state, so Red Sift has a key value store baked into its serverless environment. Not only does this mean that you can define complete applications complete with data storage as a single serverless deploy, but because the store is also used as the communications mechanism between functions, you can also implement design patterns like map/reduce naturally and easily.

3. Lots of Languages

Red Sift currently offers functions running in Javascript, Python, Clojure, Scala, Java and Julia. We’ll have Swift soon. We are very open to hearing what other languages you’d be interested in. Not only that, but since our functions run in containerised sandboxes, you can create customised execution environments with pre-installed libraries for say, natural language, or signal processing. And because the key/value store is the communication mechanism between functions you don’t have to worry about bindings between languages.

4. Full Stack

Great, so we have an platform that allows us to create complete serverless applications complete with storage and capable of nice design patterns, what about a UI? Well, we cover that as well. You can designate parts of the key/value store to be mirrored up to the browser environment where they can be hooked into any frontend framework you want, such as React/Redux. We also provided a full frontend webpack based bundler, so you can define complete, real-time web applications all within our serverless environment.

5. Local Development, Github deploy

To make development and debugging easy, our SDK allows you to develop Red Sift applications completely independently of our cloud platform. When you are ready to move to production, all you have to do is commit your repository to Github. Red Sift will scan your repo’s and list all those that are Red Sift applications on our dashboard, ready for you to run on demand.

We think that Red Sift Cloud offers real advantages for developers who want to move on to the next level of serverless computing. You can find our documentation and screencasts at https://docs.redsift.com and on our YouTubechannel,